The Full Circle || One Crazy Weekend!

Happy, curious, nervous, excited, a little terrified, completely terrified, thankful...the list of emotions and sentiments we felt from this weekend could fill a book - a really thick book.

This past Saturday morning at 10am, our living room/meeting room got nice and cozy with photographers from all over Canada, who were looking to gain some insights on how we brought our studio to where it is today. Money was spent, family plans rearranged, plane tickets booked, hours of driving were driven... all of that to be there in our living room, waiting to hear what we had to say. Were we confident in the value of what we had to share with them? Yes. Were we nervous, almost to the point of nausea? You bet. So keeping all that in mind, imagine having these photographers show up on Saturday morning to a forensics team running around our house and us only having had about 40 minutes of sleep total... well that's how things actually went down.

Our house was broken into,about 8 hours before everyone was due to arrive at our door. Seriously. It was 1:45am and we were just nodding off after completing all the last little details like setting out treat bags (we're dorks) and hooking the laptop up to the TV, when we heard a noise. I won't share all the details, but this person even went right up stairs and flipped the lights on in our boys room. Police were called (and arrived almost immediately), and we had people running around our house with guns drawn...it was NUTS. Nuts I tell you. Everyone is okay, thankfully and the only things taken were our wireless keyboard and trackpad. The thief had a pile of camera and computer gear wrapped up and ready to go, but didn't get a chance to grab it as I was chasing him out of the house. You can tell we were going to get a lot of sleep, hey?

Fast forward a few short hours and there we were, at 10am, physically and emotionally drained as we hit the space bar on our laptop to go from slide 1 to slide 2 of our 79 slide, super in-depth keynote presentation. Before we hit that space bar, I was truly unsure of how we were going to get through the next seven hours.

But the space bar was hit and there I saw the presenter notes for slide #2

By the time I was done that slide I was like a different person than I was 2 minutes beforehand. Just saying those few things out loud to the people sitting in front of me totally recharged my batteries and I was instantly refocused on what we had to do that day. It was the weirdest and coolest thing. I'm sure glad it was slide #2 and not slide #62! :)

Saturday was truly a great day. We didn't even feel tired!

The next day was another busy one! We were shooting a mock wedding complete with an awesome couple, a gorgeous wedding dress, florals, a tablescape, professional makeup and hair and yup, it all went down right at our house! Gluttons for punishment over here.

Here's the dream team that made it happen. Julianne from A Modern Proposal Event Planning and Design put together the table scape (among many other things!), Helen from HOI Makeup Artistry out of Calgary did the make up AND hair for us, and Jenn from Akiko Florals brought some insanely awesome flowers. For any future brides out there, click the links to their pages and get them working on your event pronto. They are all SO great to work with.

So below are some shots from the day. Being that this workshop is all about doing what you love, I decided to shoot most of the day on film, so 99% of what you'll see below was shot with my medium format film camera and Fuji 400H film. Enjoy!

Delica Bridal let us have the run of the place last week so we could find the perfect dress for the occasion. And there it is. Boom. Need a wedding dress? Go to Delica Bridal, it's where all the cool kids are going. You want to be there.

Emily and Darryl were our awesome models! Julianne helped plan their wedding a couple of years ago and they also had attended one of our beginner photography classes from last year, so it was really fun to do the shoot with them!

Tablescape!

So our house was broken into and all I can think about was how much fun I had this past weekend. What??

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much to everyone who made this workshop such a great success!